XML Paper Specification

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**XML Paper Specification (XPS)**

The XPS Viewer application displaying a printout of the Wikipedia front page
File extension:	`.xps`
MIME type:	`application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument`
Developed by:	Microsoft

1 Overview
2 Technology
3 Licensing
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Overview

The XML Paper Specification (XPS), formerly codenamed "Metro", is a document storage and viewing specification developed by Microsoft. The specification itself describes the formats and rules for distributing, archiving, rendering, and processing XPS documents. Most notably, the markup language for XPS is a subset of XAML for Windows Presentation Foundation, so that the methods used for rendering Windows applications can be used for documents.

XPS is viewed as a potential competitor to Adobe's portable document format (PDF). XPS, however, is a static document format that does not include dynamic capabilities similar to those of PDF.

Microsoft has indicated that premium signed devices will require an XPSDrv solution by June 1, 2007. [1]

XPS is shipped with Microsoft's Windows Vista and has the support of office printing system companies^{[citation needed]} such as Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh and Xerox and software companies such as Software Imaging [2] and Informative Graphics. [3]

[edit] Technology

An XPS file is in fact a ZIP archive, which contains the files which make up the document. These include an XML markup file for each page, the embedded images and fonts, as well as the digital rights management information. The contents of the XPS file can be examined simply by opening the file as a ZIP file. In Windows this can be accomplished by simply replacing the .xps file extension with .zip, and then opening it with any ZIP file viewer, including the one built into the operating system.

[edit] Licensing

In order to encourage wide use of the format, Microsoft has released XPS under a royalty-free patent license, allowing users to freely create implementations of the specification that read, write and render XPS files. Microsoft also includes a provision in the patent license, called the "Covenant Not to Sue" provision, pledging not to sue particular businesses for use of XPS. The specification itself is released under a royalty-free copyright license, allowing its free distribution.^[1]